Steve Martini - Trader of secrets

“The last time I checked, bin Laden was still number one. And that’s going on ten years now,” says Harry. “And, of course, while they’re looking, we don’t have a life. Can’t go home cuz Liquida may be waiting for us.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve thought about it. I can’t speak for either of you, but I don’t intend to sit around growing old, waiting and hoping that somebody snags the crazy bastard before he kills me or murders my daughter.” I look at both of them. “He came within a breath of killing Herman. He’s made one attempt on Sarah’s life and murdered one of her friends.”

Liquida killed Jenny, one of Sarah’s girlfriends, after following the two of them to a club in San Diego. It was Liquida’s twisted way of sending a message that my family and I were next.

“So you think he’ll try again?” says Joselyn.

“Hell, yes,” says Harry. “Unless he dies of cancer or gets hit by a truck.”

Harry, Herman, and I had become entangled with this psychotic as a result of a case that turned out to have connections with terrorism south of the border. Ever since then Liquida has been crossing our path with the constancy of an orbiting death star, making it crystal clear that he has declared war on us even if we refuse to realize it.

“It’s cultural,” I tell her. “Liquida has his roots in the Mexican cartels. These are people to whom vengeance is a religion. Only heretics allow the flame of revenge to go out.”

“What did you do to him?” she asks.

“I don’t know. But it wouldn’t matter even if I knew. Assuming I could undo whatever it was, it would make no difference to Liquida. He has no sense of proper proportion. Look at him without genuflecting and he’ll kill your entire family, shoot your dog, and burn your house. When he’s finished, he’ll dig up your ancestors and grind their bones to dust for fertilizer. He may have gone upwardly mobile and branched out to service the international terror trade, but his instincts come from the cartels.”

“So what do we do?” says Joselyn. “Stay here? Hope the FBI will provide protection? Pray they’ll catch him?”

“For how long?” says Harry. “We’ve been through this before. Hiding out in an FBI safe house. You weren’t with us.”

“Harry’s right. And when we came out into the open, Liquida came back. He killed Jenny. While we were looking for him he was busy hunting down Sarah. He’s smart and he’s very patient. He knows sooner or later we have to surface again. He’ll simply wait. When we feel safe, when we get into the routine of life with the illusion of security, that’s when he’ll hit us. And this time we may not be so lucky.”

“I can’t disagree with your logic, but it still doesn’t answer the question of what we do,” says Joselyn.

“Simple, we find him before he finds us,” says Harry.

“Unless you have a better idea,” I tell her.

“We tried that; it didn’t work, remember? Herman very nearly got killed,” says Joselyn. “It’s too dangerous. We don’t have the resources. Look around the table. There’s three of us. None of us has a gun or, for that matter, knows how to use one. Herman was your only real backup in terms of security and he’s down. Let the FBI do it.”

“We could die of old age hiding out in this hole,” says Harry. “The FBI’s got a full plate, and Liquida probably doesn’t even show up on their list of hors d’oeuvres. We could be here for years. I’m not that patient. You want to know the truth, I’d just as soon be dead.”

“If you go after him, you probably will be,” says Joselyn.

“I don’t intend to go toe to toe with Liquida. But if I can find a lead, hand it off to Thorpe, or let the local police take him down, I’ll settle for that,” I tell them.

“Only if they lock him up at Supermax and I can swallow the key,” says Harry. “On the other hand, there’s nothing more permanent than death.”

“Listen to him,” says Joselyn. “Dirty Harry wants to kill him?”

“Why not? He wants to kill us.”

“Harry is a different kind of criminal defense lawyer,” I tell her.

“And how would you go about this?” asks Joselyn.

“Well, I wouldn’t try to take him in a knife fight, if that’s what you mean,” says Harry. “But then, this isn’t a duel, and Liquida doesn’t necessarily get to choose the weapons.”

“So what’s it to be, water pistols at twenty feet?” she asks.

“Show me where he hides his coffin and I’ll rent a cement truck, fly it through his window, and run over him in his sleep,” says Harry. “That way I can take my time driving the stake through his heart.”

“Listen to this man.” Joselyn thinks he’s joking.

The fact is, Harry is one of the few people I know whose capacity to kill I would never question, not if the motivation was sufficient. And knowing Harry, he wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep after he did it.

Harry has what you call a hair trigger. Some might call it an anger management problem. Rub him the wrong way and there’s no way of telling what might come out of the barrel. More than once I have had to pull him off someone before he did serious damage. I have seen Harry kick the crap out of drunks in bars who got in his face thinking it might be fun to push the guy in the rumpled suit with the bow tie. He once pounded the shit out of a client using a casebook off his shelf when the guy started slapping his wife around in Harry’s office. The fact that the man was there on a manslaughter rap didn’t even enter the equation. Not to Harry. It was all in a day’s work.

It’s not that Harry brawls. But if you push his button, he can go crazy all over you. His victims are often stunned and defenseless in the same way you might be if you stepped on a pit viper you thought was a common variety garden snake.

In a crowded room Harry is the guy you never notice, the one holding the smoking gun.

If I got a phone call in the middle of the night telling me that my partner was in the clink on a homicide charge, it wouldn’t exactly shatter my image of who Harry is.

“Fine, now that we know how we’re going to kill him,” says Joselyn, “how do we find him? What about that address in Thailand?” She looks at me.

“What address?” says Harry.

“Herman and I found a notepad in a hotel room in Puerto Rico when we were trying to track down Thorn. You remember, Liquida’s client in the D.C. bombing.”

“Yeah?”

“The note was from an impression left on the inside cover of a notepad. It mentioned something called ‘Waters of Death’ with an address in Thailand. It was something Thorn had jotted down. To me it looked like a contact address for Liquida.”

“Was it?” says Harry.

“We don’t know. I turned the information over to Thorpe. He had two of his agents from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok check it out. A few days later he told me they struck out. The address was for an office in a place called Pattaya. Thorpe told me his people found the office, but it was locked up and dark. There was nobody inside. There was nothing on the door or anywhere else in the building with the name ‘Waters of Death.’ ”

“Maybe they got the address wrong,” says Joselyn.

“No, according to Thorpe it was the right address. The one on the note. It even had the suite number. They had the local police check with the landlord. The office was on a year-to-year lease. The tenant was a Thai businessman. The local authorities told the FBI agents that the guy had no apparent criminal history. The cops found him, and the agents talked to him. The man told them that he used the office only to store business records. He said he never heard of anything called Waters of Death. He had no idea what it was.”